Michael Caine’s 70s career had its ups and downs, but what do the 80s have in store? We take a look, starting with 1980’s The Island.
Michael Caine showed no sign of slowing down as he entered his third decade as a leading man. The 1980s would see him win his first Academy Award (Hannah And Her Sisters), tackle new genres such as horror (The Hand) and shark-based revenge movie (Jaws: The Revenge) whilst continuing to work with interesting new auteurs like Brian De Palma (Dressed To Kill) as well as old friends from classic Hollywood such as John Huston (Escape To Victory).
Film by film, we’ll be taking a look at Caine’s 1980s filmography to see what hidden gems we can unearth alongside the more familiar classics…
Spoilers for The Island lay ahead.
Directed by: Michael Ritchie (The Candidate, The Bad News Bears, Fletch, The Golden Child)
Tagline: “For three hundred years, a terrifying secret has been kept from the outside world.”
“This summer the most terrifying thing in the water is The Island.”
Other Featured Geezers: David Warner as John David Nau, Angela Punch McGregor as Beth, Frank Middlemass as Windsor, Don Henderson as Rollo, Dudley Sutton as Dr Brazil, Reg Evans as Jack the Bat, Jeffrey Frank as Justin Maynard.
What’s it all about, Alfie?: It’s important to preface this by saying this is definitely the actual plot. I haven’t had a breakdown and hallucinated this after watching too many Michael Caine movies.
Caine plays Blair Maynard (who happens to share a surname with the real-life Captain Robert Maynard who killed Blackbeard, a fact that will come into play later in the film…sort of) a New York journalist investigating a spate of recent disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Annoyingly though it’s his weekend to look after his son Justin, so he lies to him and says they’re going to Disneyworld. Instead he takes him to “the asshole of the Western world,” as it’s described by the unhinged cargo plane pilot (who has a pet pig/co-pilot) they get a lift from before crashing.
Maynard’s chances of being voted father of the year continue to deplete as, out on a fishing trip, they then get attacked by an unkempt hairy man. He takes them to the titular island, which is filled with a load of pirates who act like it’s still the 1700s including David Warner, an occasional nudist, and Ian McShane’s friend from Lovejoy. They chain Maynard up and force him to breed with their token Pirate lady, and also indoctrinate Justin into the pirate life as a way of securing a pirate legacy. They then all hang around on the island doing pirate-y stuff for a while before getting interrupted by the coast guard. Then Maynard machine guns the whole bunch of them to death in cold blood. The end.
Looking at the below still without giving you any context is an accurate representation of what it felt like throughout watching this bewildering movie.
To neatly summarise this film in one sentence using a quote from Maynard, it’s basically about “a bunch of arseholes playing Long John f***ing Silver” (which should have been the tagline).
Caine-ness: Apparently to this day Caine refuses to discuss this movie. I’m not sure if it’s because he’s ashamed of it, traumatised by it, or simply finds it completely inexplicable. It could be any or all of those options.
Caine is top billed as Blair Maynard, but we see the titular island immediately before we see him (the filmmakers clearly know what the audience is really here for). We first see Caine about five minutes in, walking along a busy New York street and reading a newspaper. This is an apt prop to introduce him with (I think the technical term is a “Chekhov’s newspaper”) as we soon find out that he’s a reporter.
Here we get a familiar Caine performance. He wears his trademark glasses and uses his normal accent since he’s playing an Englishman but, unfortunately for him (and much like Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne), he has a son who has tragically been born American. This was Jeffrey Frank’s only film role as Justin Maynard. He’s fine though, as far as child performances go, but his character does have a really annoying habit of referring to various things that he likes as being “outrageous,” things that include, but not are not limited to, Space Mountain and a Colt Frontier 44 pistol.
Maynard is definitely not a father figure anyone should try to emulate. In the opening 15 minutes he lies about taking Justin to Disneyworld (or the “Orlando Museum of famous ducks and mice” as Maynard calls it) then impulsively buys him a handgun and a pro-gun t-shirt, and tells him not to tell his Mum, after Justin pesters him. Then ultimately what should have been a lovely father/son bonding weekend ends up with Justin spending most of the time shooting people in the head (only two people to be fair, but that’s still two too many for a boy of his age) whilst his dad systematically bonks a filthy pirate lady in a hut.
Blair Maynard is one of Caine’s most laid back characters but, given the various completely insane ordeals he goes through, he definitely shouldn’t be and the fact that he is so relaxed throughout gives me major cause for concern. At the start, before things even properly kick off, he’s pretty chilled when his son is waving around a gun in the car and making shooting noises. Then later he’s also not too fussed when the pirates make Justin shoot fruit out of his hands. When he’s tied up watching various crazy pirate ceremonies, he mainly just looks a bit bemused, not frightened for his life as any right-minded person should be.
One of the only instances that we get shouty and pointy Caine in this film is after the unhinged cargo plane pilot crashes and nearly kills Maynard and Justin. However, acting as a reminder that it’s not healthy to repress your feelings, this unvented rage does ultimately explode during the finale when Maynard goes full John Rambo and brutally machine guns down every single pirate. This is definitely Caine’s highest body count in a film so far.
This film also gives the chance for Caine to get unconvincingly attacked by a very unconvincing squid/jellyfish/some discarded multi-coloured bunting in the sea. Due to the (deliberate I assume) low lighting, its very hard to see what’s going on here, but Caine tries his best to sell it.
Maynard also gets an odd semi-romance with a pirate lady, Beth (Angela Punch McGregor), who he’s forced to shack up with in the hopes of spawning a litter of baby pirates. When he first meets her he’s tied up and she’s caked in mud (I hope) and looks like Old Gregg from The Mighty Boosh. She emerges from the shadows, slowly walks up to Maynard and spits on him. He’s rightly speechless for all of this because there’s nothing really you can say, is there?
She then keeps him on a chain and takes him out for walks to collect pebbles whilst Ennio Morricone’s inappropriately romantic score plays and they shelter from the rain in some nearby shrubbery. Hey, I don’t judge. They’re both single, so if it works for them, good on them. At the very least it’s a more healthy relationship than his character had with Elizabeth Taylor in Zee And Co.
Read more: The 1970s films of Michael Caine: Zee And Co
Caine-nections*: David Warner had previously appeared alongside Caine in the slightly less odd, but still pretty odd, Silver Bears in 1977.
Maynard says he learnt to be a good shot after fighting in Korea, just like Michael Caine did in real life (to clarify, during the war, not just whilst on a holiday).
It was only a few films prior in Ashanti where Caine’s sweaty back was previously featured, and he’s prominently perspiring again in this one (much to the dismay of Frank Middlemass as you can see).
*I’m only counting from Caine’s first starring role in Zulu onwards.
Best Non-Caine Actors: We are off to a rough start with the first characters that we see during the opening (simply named in the credits as Doctor 1, Doctor 2 and Doctor 3) as their acting is iffy. Thankfully they’re all soon brutally murdered by a pirate, and so we don’t have to suffer through them attempting to act again. Doctor 3 was apparently played by someone with the suspiciously made-up sounding name of James J Casino.
Then the rest of the cast mainly consists of the band of weirdo pirates, which includes David Warner as their leader, Nau, the most erudite and seemingly normal of the bunch, Dudley Sutton as Dr Brazil who has a cracking sense of humour (when Justin shoots a man off the ship’s mast he says “don’t come near, he has the falling sickness.” What a joker!), Reg Evans as Jack the Bat, who gets his bits out for no particular reason in one scene (thankfully covered mostly by his pirate handbag but not always), and Don Henderson as Rollo whose thing seems to be that he’s just a bit thick.
Read more: The 1970s films of Michael Caine: Silver Bears
The film, for some reason, treats pirates as if they’re a fictional monster like a werewolf or a vampire rather than simply a bunch of historical criminals. The pirates all talk in a weird pidgin English to convey they’re from a different time, and no actor comes across well when forced to do this (I’m looking at you Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas). A lot of the time I had absolutely no clue what they were talking about, but I did like it when David Warner criticised Maynard for not being good enough at sex, and encourages him to eat more, by saying; “Hungry hombre make bad thrust.”
Apart from all the rape and murder these buccaneers are a fairly innocent bunch though. They have no idea what cocaine is when they find it on a boat and tip it overboard. They also don’t understand modern technology. One of them seems to try to blow dry his own eye at one point.
My favourite supporting character was the man with blue hot pants and a mullet who makes Bruce Lee-esque kung fu noises and tries to fight them before getting promptly killed. He’s also reading the novelisation of Alien for some reason. This movie is odd.
My Bleedin’ Thoughts: The Island, not to be confused with The Island (2005, Michael Bay), The Island (2006, Pavel Lungin), The Island (2007, Sherif Arafa), The Island (2018, Huang Bo), Barbie As The Island Princess (2007, Greg Richardson) or the Republic of Ireland (a country), may not have an original title but everything else about it is pretty unique. I can’t imagine anything as bizarre as this getting a major studio release with a big star attached nowadays.
With a screenplay by Peter Benchley, based on his own novel, and continuing his run of stories focused on scary water-based things being adapted into films after Jaws (1975) and The Deep (1977), and with a great score by Ennio Morricone, and an interesting director in Michael Ritchie, this has all the ingredients for a solid action adventure movie. It doesn’t quite live up to those expectations, though, and instead we get an odd hodgepodge of a film that is neither entirely one thing or another.
It has elements of a fun family adventure romp, a sort of modern father-son Treasure Island escapade, but then it’s very firmly not a family film. It’s rated 18 and features some genuinely gnarly violence. I was surprised by the very gruesome and brutal axe attack that opens the film, which feels like something out of Friday The 13th (which was released the same year. Perhaps The Island was ahead of its time). There are slit throats and assorted violence aplenty throughout the rest of the film too.
But, to counteract the horror, there are plenty of very silly and goofy bits of comedy (unsurprisingly given that the director was mainly known for lighter movies such as The Bad News Bears and Fletch). Tonally, I was never entirely sure where I stood with this film, but honestly that kind of added to the weird charm of it for me. You never knew what exactly would happen next.
This film was nominated for Worst Director and Worst Actor for Caine (a nomination unfairly shared with his performance in his next film Dressed To Kill, too) at the first Razzie awards. The Shining, Cruising, and the aforementioned Friday The 13th also received nominations that year, which demonstrates very clearly that the Razzies should never be taken seriously. The Island certainly isn’t a great film, but it’s interesting and takes creative risks which should be applauded and not shamed.
Trivia (courtesy of IMDb): Steven Spielberg was asked to direct but turned it down to make his notorious flop 1941 instead. Whether that was a good choice or not is debatable.
As Maynard exits the plane before it explodes, he yells “Run Jeffrey” which is the name of the actor playing his son. This could be in character though, as Maynard is such a bad father I wouldn’t be surprised if he forgot his son’s name.
Overall Thoughts: Whilst not objectively a “good” movie, this is a truly bizarre oddity that’s well worth watching simply out of morbid curiosity. It’s genuinely entertaining in its own weird way and never dull.
Rating: 3/5 Caines bearing fruit
Up Next: Caine gets kinky in Brian De Palma’s problematic classic Dressed To Kill.
